Summary advanced criminology
Chapter 2: classical criminology
- The Classical School of criminology established the essential components of the
rational actor model.
- Classical School criminology is based on the concepts of free will and hedonism
where all human behaviour is purposive and based on the pleasure–pain principle.
- Punishment should reflect that principle with fixed sanctions for all offences written
into the law and not be open to the interpretation, or discretion, of judges.
- The law must apply equally to all citizens, and all found guilty of a particular offence
should suffer the same prescribed penalty.
- Punishment must outweigh any pleasure derived from criminal behaviour, but the law
must not be as harsh and severe as to reduce the greatest happiness.
- Jeremy Bentham designed a prison – the Panopticon – to reflect and operationalize
his ideas on criminal justice and to act as a model for schools, asylums, workhouses,
facto- ries and hospitals.
- It became increasingly apparent that people are not equally responsible for their ac-
tions, with the outcome that increasingly experts were introduced into the courtroom
to pass opinion on the level of culpability of the accused and judges were able to vary
sentences accordingly.
- These revisions to the penal code led to sentences becoming more individualized,
dependent on the extent of mitigating circumstances, with punishment increasingly
expressed in terms of the possibilities for rehabilitation.
- The rational actor model went out of fashion as an explanatory model of criminal
behaviour at the end of the nineteenth century but continued to inform criminal justice
systems throughout the world and is reflected in the contemporary ‘just deserts’
approach to sentencing.
- Packer (1968) observes that the whole contemporary criminal justice system is
founded on a balance between the competing value systems of due process and
crime control.
Chapter 4: contemporary rational actor theories
- At the core of contemporary deterrence theories are the principles of certainty,
severity and celerity of punishment, proportionality, specific and general deterrence.
- With ‘general deterrence’, the punishment of offenders serves as an example to the
gen- eral population who will be frightened into non-participation in criminal
behaviour.
- With ‘specific deterrence’, the apprehended and punished offender will refrain from
repeat offending because they realize that they are certain to be caught and severely
punished.
- Imposing deterrent sentences on individuals who have little or no control over their
impulses would appear morally indefensible.
- The high recidivism rate further challenges the usefulness of contemporary
deterrence theories.
- Earlier and less sophisticated variants of rational choice theory compared the
decision-making process of offenders with straightforward economic choice.
- Early variants of rational choice theory considered offender motivation to be
irrelevant, although later variations propose that offenders choose to act in a certain
way because these actions appear to them rational in the circumstances in which
they find themselves.
- Routine activities theory proposes that for a personal or property crime to occur there
must be at the same time and place a perpetrator, a victim and/or an object of
property.
, - The offence can be prevented if the potential victim or another person is present who
can take action to deter it. Ordinary people, ourselves, friends, family or even
strangers are the most likely capable guardians.
Chapter 6: psychological positivism
Three grouping
1. Psychodynamic theories
2. Behavioural learning theories
3. Cognitive learning theories
Psychodynamic theories (Freud)
- Id, ego, superego
- Disturbance in the psychosexual development stages leads to criminal behaviour in
later life. The role of the parent and child is unconscious.
- Offenders have a weak conscience. The ego fails to resolve the tensions resulting
from the need to satisfy the inner urges of the id.
- Predestined actor model
Aichhorn
- At birth, a child has certain instinctive drives and is not yet affected by the norms of
society: asocial state.
- Ineffective development: remain asocial. When drives are not acted out/suppressed
latent delinquency, which can be activated to actual delinquency
o Because of absence of intimate attachment with parents
Healy and Bronner
- Circumstances within a household may well be experienced as favourable for one
child but not the sibling.
- Study: pair of brothers, 1 persistent offender (19% had experienced good quality
family conditions), 1 non-offener (30% had experienced good quality family
conditions).
- Individuals might react differently to the same circumstances: difference in
development of conscience ego and superego
John Bowlby: maternal deprivation theory
Argued that offending behaviour takes place when a child has not enjoyed a close and
continuous relationship with its mother during its formative years.
- Was found insignificant: offenders are no more likely to have been separated from
their mothers than non-offenders. Little (1963) found that it was however more
common to have been separated from at least one parent. In this, separations from
the father were more common.
- No evidence that the effect of separations are irreversible (Wooton)
- More children from a broken home by separation recidive compared to children with a
broken home by death of a parent (West). Broken homes are seen more often among
black than white offenders (Monohan).
- Children from single-parent families are more prone to engage in deviant behaviour
because they spent less time interacting with someone who offers a parental role (like
moral guide, discipline, attentive to the needs).
Glueck and Glueck
Fathers of offenders provided lax and inconsistent discipline, with the use of physical
punishment by both parents, and giving praise rare.
,Hoffman and Saltzstein: identified three types of child-rearing techniques
1. Power assertions: (threat of) use of violence/withdrawal of material privileges (about
fear).
2. Love withdrawal: (threat to) withdraw affection from the child (about guilt).
3. Induction: letting the child know how its actions have affected the parent, encouraging
empathetic response (about guilt).
Other psychodynamic tradition
- Offenders have a weak ego.
- Mood disorders
o Conduct disorders: difficulty following rules and behaving socially acceptable
o Oppositional defiant disorder: defiance (opstandigheid), uncooperativeness,
irritability, negative attitude, temper tantrums, being annoying towards people.
Two theories as to why this exists
1. Ineffective development
2. Learned through negative reinforcement
- Female offenders have a higher rate of mental health symptoms than male offenders.
Children with power assertions upbringing are more likely to become offenders because their
behaviour depends on externalized control, while those with love withdrawal and induction
upbringing depend on their own internalized control.
Five explanations for the association to be found between moral development and the use of
child-rearing techniques.
1. Open display of anger and aggression by a parent when disciplining a child increases
the dependence of discipline on external control.
2. The anxiety associated with love withdrawal and induction make the development of
internal control more likely.
3. Third, where love withdrawal is used, the punishment ends when the child confesses
or makes reparation, which is referred to as engaging in a corrective act. In the case
of physical punishment, there is likely to be a lapse of time between it being carried
out and the child performing a corrective act.
4. Withholding love intensifies the resolve of the child to behave in an approved manner
in order to retain love.
5. The use of induction is particularly effective in enabling the child to examine and
correct the behaviour that has been disapproved of.
Behavioural learning theories
Eysenck describes three dimensions of personality: extroversion – which itself consists of
two different components, impulsiveness and sociability, and which are themselves partly
independent of each other: neuroticism and psychoticism. Each dimension takes the form of
a continuum that runs from high to low. Low extroversion is sometimes termed introversion
and, in the case of neuroticism, a person with a high score would be regarded as neurotic
and someone with a low score stable. Scores are usually obtained by the administration of a
personality questionnaire, of which there are several versions, and it is usual to abbreviate
the descriptions of a person’s score, for example, high N (neuroticism), high E (extroversion)
and high P (psychoticism).
- Someone with a high E and N (neurotic extrovert) will not condition well
- A low E and low N (stable introvert) are most effectively conditioned.
1. Psychodynamic explanations of crime and criminal behaviour have their origins in the
extremely influential work of Sigmund Freud and his assertion that sexuality is
present from birth, which is the fundamental basis of psychoanalysis.
, 2. Freud proposed two different models of criminal behaviour: the first proposes that
criminality reflects a state of mental disturbance or illness; the second that offenders
possess a ‘weak conscience’.
3. John Bowlby (1952) influentially argued that offending behaviour takes place when a
child has not enjoyed a close and continuous relationship with its mother during its
formative years.
4. Maginnis (1997) concludes that the most reliable indicator of violent crime in a com-
munity is the proportion of fatherless families.
5. Behavioural learning theories have their origins in the work of I.P. Pavlov and B.F.
Skinner, and Hans Eysenck (1970, 1977) sought to build a general theory of criminal
behaviour based on their psychological concept of conditioning.
6. Definitions of psychopathy in general emphasize such traits as an incapacity for
loyalty, selfishness, irresponsibility, impulsiveness, inability to feel guilt and failure to
learn from experience.
7. Personality typing (or offender profiling) has been used to help detect particular types
of criminals and is a method found to have been most useful in the detection of serial
murders.
Cognitive learning theories
Psychodynamic and behavioural learning theories: predestined actor model: patterns of
reasoning and behaviour are specific to offenders and remain constant regardless of different
social experiences.
- Cognitive learning theories critiqued that.
Social learning theory
Emphasized that behaviour may be reinforced (like Skinner said) not only trough actual
rewards and punishments, but also through expectations that are learned by watching what
happens to other people. Crime is learned behaviour.
Early proponent of ‘crime is normal learned behaviour’: Gabriel Tarde: Laws of imitation. First
to propose that criminal behaviour is not biologically or psychologically predestined.
- You learn behaviour in association with others, behaviour follows from the
incorporation of those ideas.
1. People imitate each other in proportion to amount of contact and this is more frequent
and changes more rapidly in urban areas
2. Inferiors imitate the superiors
3. Newer fashions replace older ones (shooting became knifing).
- Tarde had a big influence on Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory.
Differential Association
- Explained interaction patterns by which thieves are restricted in their physical and
social contacts to association with like-minded others: like a subculture.
- Crime is a learned activity much like any other.
- Frequency and consistency of contacts with patterns of criminality determines the
chance that a person will participate in systematic criminal behaviour.
o Cause: existence of different cultural groups with different normative
structures: differential social organization.
Sutherland saw criminal behaviour as learned as a result of associations with others: the
differential association (number of contacts of criminals over non-criminals, frequency,
duration, priority, intensity). He said that the sources of behavioral motivation for criminals
are much like those of conformists (desire for money and success).
- Suttles believes that the historical sense of community provides a strong
- In contrast to psychological explanations: primary groups to which people belong
exert the strongest influence on them: explains the occurrence of all criminal conduct.
